Online competition

Back in February last year, Stana posted a selfie of mine in the blog post Alice's favorite photo (of Alice!) on her blog, Femulate, as part of a series of reader submitted photos of themselves.

In February this year, Stana posted about what she referred to as an Online Womanless Competition. When I went to the web site hosting the competition, I was rather surprised to see my selfie on their site, shrunk to the point of making the watermark unreadable, then attached to a an unrelated image. My first thought was that when I went to the site, it had somehow used the image from my Google or Facebook profile, but it was a static image that everybody got if they went to that site during February. 

I was simultaneously upset that they used my photo without asking me first, and pleased that they thought that it was good enough to steal.

With that in mind, I had to think about whether I wanted to enter their competition, and ended up doing so just before it closed. Since they wanted a full-length photo and I didn't want to submit the same outfit as the photo that they'd swiped, I ended up submitting photos of the outfit that I wore to a nail appointment in April 2014, a fortnight before the photo that they had used.

I submitted three photos ~ a close-up selfie, and front and rear photos taken at the salon. Oddly, I was apparently the only person to submit a rear photo.

After a few weeks of waiting, the results came out. They'd apparently struggled to choose the winners. They'd chosen two entries for first and second places but took a while to decide who got which, and they had to bring an extra judge in to break a three-way deadlock for third place.

After all of that, I came second. Apparently they thought that the detail of my makeup let me down. Given that outing was before I had my eyelids done, it wasn't entirely surprising because my lids always hid my eyeliner. The close-up photo that they were judging was also taken at the end of the outing, by which time my foundation was shiny and the whole lot generally faded. Overall, for something that was never intended to be a competition entry, I'm pretty happy to have come a close second. :-)

The prize was a US$50 voucher to an online clothing store called Choies. I ordered a dress and a skirt (both red), which totalled about $47. I'll just have to wait and see if they will fit...